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What Germany succeeded in doing in East Africa after years of intrigue and deceit, and the expenditure of much blood and money, she accomplished in the acquisition of Togoland with a minimum of cost or trouble. Dr. Nachtigal, in the capacity of German Trade Commissioner, was sent to West Africa by his Government to enquire into and report upon the progress of German commerce in those latitudes. He was despatched at a time when the English Government had completed their leisurely deliberations upon the appeal of the peoples of Togoland and the Cameroons to be taken under the protection of the British flag, and Mr. Hewitt, a British Consul, was voyaging to the Gulf of Guinea for the purpose of complying with the native request, when Nachtigal arrived there on his commercial mission. The German Commissioner, acting under instructions from the Imperial Chancellor, hastily unfurled the flag of the Fatherland at Lome, in Togoland, and succeeded in reaching Duala, and formally placing the Cameroons under German rule, before Hewitt arrived upon the scene. Lord Granville addressed a reproof to Bismarck for not having divulged the nature of the errand upon which Nachtigal had been sent, and the incident was closed. In the three decades that followed, the German administrators in Togoland, with the thoroughness with which the Teuton is gifted, taught the natives the “sharp lesson” considered necessary to prepare them for the reception of Germany’s civilising rule, furnished the colony with 200 miles of railway, over 750 miles of excellent roads of native construction, a score of postal and telegraph stations, and a telephone system, and established a wireless station—the most powerful in the world outside Europe—which was not only in communication with Berlin, 3,450 miles distant, but with East Africa, the Cameroons and South-West Africa. The final installations at Kamina were completed in June, 1914; in August the German operators learnt by wireless that Great Britain had declared war on Germany; and on 26th August the Kamina Station notified Berlin that the colony of Togoland, the smallest, completest, and only financially independent German possession, had capitulated to an Anglo-French force.